The wife of Moscow's embattled mayor Yury Luzhkov says the recent media smear campaign against him reveals mounting tensions within the Kremlin ahead of the 2012 presidential polls.
"There are people in the presidential administration who fear that as the election gets closer, the mayor may not take the position of President [Dmitry] Medvedev but of Premier [Vladimir] Putin," Yelena Baturina said in an interview with the New Times magazine.
Baturina said she didn't understand why "the country's leaders pretend there is nothing going on," as Putin, the mayor's powerful patron, remains silent.
Luzhkov resumed his vacation and went back to Austria for another week on Sunday, but analysts say he is only taking time out to see what the Kremlin does next.
State-controlled media carried out an extraordinary 1990s-style hatchet job on Luzhkov in September, with TV channels portraying Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor since 1992, as an obtuse, money-loving apparatchik, who relaxed in Austria during this summer's smog crisis and spent more money on his bees than the smog-affected Muscovites. Attacks on senior politicians by state media have been extremely rare in the last decade.
Luzhkov has said he will see out his term in office, due to finish next summer, despite increasing pressure on him. A Kremlin source said Luzhkov had a "long meeting" with the Kremlin administration late last Friday. The subject of that discussion was not Luzhkov's vacation, the source said.
Speaking at a trade union meeting in Moscow on Saturday, Luzhkov complained, in an apparent reference to Russia's ruling Medvedev-Putin tandem, that "our friends from St. Petersburg... have a certain priority in society today." Some analysts think President Medvedev is increasingly at odds with Putin, his long-time mentor, those differences becoming more apparent as the presidential elections are only a year and a half away. Putin, still Russia's most popular politician, has recently hinted he will make a bid to return to the presidency in 2012.
The Kremlin may also need a ceasefire in the battle over Luzhkov, expert Yevgeny Mincheko told the Kommersant newspaper, saying that the president will not accept Luzhkov's resignation even in the unlikely event of the mayor handing in his notice directly after returning from vacation next week. The Kremlin simply doesn't have a decent candidate to suit "all groups in the empire called Moscow," he said.
MOSCOW, September 20 (RIA Novosti, by Alexei Korolyov)
